Each week I try to review and reflect on my previous week on the bike. This allows me to see how my fitness and ability is progressing on a wider timescale than day to day. For previous weekly reviews please click here.
This week consisted of 5 days riding, with a single indoor ride on Zwift, using ERG mode to keep my penchant for silliness in check, and the rest being outdoor rides which started badly, but ended well enough.
This week’s rides were as follows:
- Monday – Pop Goes The Knee-sal (Outdoor)
- Thursday – Knee Test (Indoor / Zwift)
- Friday – Gentle-knee Does It (Outdoor)
- Saturday – Stressed (Outdoor)
- Sunday – What’s Beyond Wallings? (Outdoor)
Things didn’t start so well for me this week.
Monday’s ride started fine, but I kept pushing and pushing, and towards the end of the ride I felt my left knee do something funny. I’m no medical professional, so all I could do was hazard a guess I’d messed it up somehow.
After crawling home – albeit under my own steam – I was convinced I’d really done some damage.
Cue two days off the bike.
When I woke on Tuesday, I wasn’t overly thrilled with how much worse my knee felt. But, fortunately, I have a job that mandates me being sat on my arse for 8 hours each day, so resting it was an easy affair.
Wednesday came and for reasons unknown to me, I awoke and it largely felt much better. No idea why. No idea how. But I was happy enough with the overnight gremlins working their knee magic. I still didn’t risk it on the bike though.
So when Thursday came, and by and large things still felt about as well as they had the day prior, I decided to do a short ride on Zwift to see how things felt.
That ride didn’t go too well to be fair.
I’d planned a very light ride, just 15 minutes at 145w. But immediately I had to knock that down to 130w as I felt definite “resistance”.
I got through that one and wasn’t sure if I had panicked a tad. So, the following night, as it was nice enough weather, I went outside for another planned light ride.
That one went better. Being outdoors I had to work a tad harder but I think that helped me get a bit more confidence that things weren’t, perhaps, as bad as I was led to believe. Still, I played it safe.
And then on Saturday I had a fairly rough day of it overall and foolishly I went out and decided to just push through the pain and do something intense.
That was a really stupid idea which, very fortunately, didn’t go badly for me. I’m really grateful for this, and maybe it meant my luck had turned. I don’t know. I do know my knee still isn’t 100%. There’s still pain there for sure. But it’s rideable.
And so with fairly poor cumulative week figures at that point I went out and did a larger ride on Sunday. Probably that was my favourite ride of the week. But it wasn’t a great week, so that’s not saying too much.
Im hoping this forthcoming week will go a little better.
I have no great plans for the week. I’m still considering dropping my Zwift subscription and trying another platform. The thing is, I’m not using the indoor stuff that much at the moment. I’m expecting that to change fairly soon as already the nights are starting to get longer, and the sun’s going down sooner. It won’t be long before I don’t have the weekday option to ride outside.
Im thinking of trying the Sufferfest. The names so off putting and the idea of the mandatory 4DP (or whatever its called) FTP test equivalent just to get going is not appealing to me either. But I think it would be as solid a reason as any to kill two birds with one stone and just get stuck into it for a month. But I guess I’m saving it for when I’ve got no other options. Yes, I’m really looking forwards to it.